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Medical Trances. The most famous personalities in the movement are faith healers like Chico Xavier, who is supposed to have no fewer than 500 spirits speaking through him. Xavier's chief rival is Seu Sete (Mister Seven), a woman who sports a top hat, gold-braided tux, and dark glasses. The cigar-smoking Seu Sete, who happens to be inhabited by a male spirit, ministers to 10,000 persons a week.
Though spiritism is practiced mostly by the impoverished urban masses, it also increasingly attracts the well-educated and well-to-do Brazilians, perhaps because of the social upheaval that has taken place since the military regime took over. Spiritism's growth in recent years, in fact, poses a distinct threat to the Catholic church, for the pagan spirits seem more often to be invoked than their saintly counterparts. Rio's Padre Affonso Gregory says the church is losing by default, but that "it would be sterile to attack spiritism without creating something to replace it that would fill the people's needs." The dioceses, he says, "must be made smaller so the people have more contact with the priest. To do this, of course, we need more priests."